The American Daniel Boorstin, who has died aged 89, was a powerful and original social historian and critic, and the first to examine, often with distaste, many aspects of modern culture, including the "image", the "non-event" and the "celebrity", all concepts either invented, or first dissected, by him.

He taught at the University of Chicago for 25 years, and served as librarian of the US Congress for 12 years. He published more than 20 books. Among them were The Image (1962), a brilliant and original essay about the black arts and corrupting influences of advertising and public relations, The Americans, a trilogy on intellectual and social history, divided into The Colonial Experience (1959), The National Experience (1966) and The Democratic Experience (1974), and three volumes on world history, with an emphasis on the history of ideas and technology - The Discoverers (1983), on scientists and inventors, The Creators (1992), on artists, and The Seekers (1998), about religious and spiritual thought.

Politically, Boorstin started out on the left, and was briefly a member of the US Communist party in the 1930s. He later moved to a conservative position. Although he never took any active part in politics after his youthful flirtation with communism, in many ways his intellectual trajectory paralleled that of neo-conservatives who moved to the right after what they saw as the excesses and absurdities of 1960s liberalism.

When attacked by the new left, Boorstin responded by calling his critics "incoherent kooks" and "barbarians". He stoutly maintained that he hated racism and believed in equal opportunity for blacks, but he angered many African-American leaders and intellectuals by dismissing black studies as "racist trash".

Boorstin's learning and diligence were legendary. When he was appointed librarian of Congress, a public office requiring approval from the US senate, several senators asked him to give up writing while he was in the job. He refused, but said he would not write in the public's time. He continued to pour forth scholarly works by getting up at 4.30am and working until it was time to go to the library at nine.

His books became bestsellers, and had an immense influence. There is a certain irony about the fact that, although one of Boorstin's main themes was the way intellectual life had been cheapened and vulgarised by the simplifications of politicians, journalists and publicists, his own work was far more popular with the general reader than with professional historians, who accused him of various biases and myth-making.

Boorstin's first book to make a major impact, The Image, evolved from an essay he wrote in response to the televised debates between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in the 1960 US presidential campaign. America, he argued, was threatened by "the menace of unreality". He was particularly angered by the packaging of politicians and policies, and by the way that political advertising and journalism replaced factual description and analysis with the presentation of self-interested images.

Boorstin apologised for his Communist party membership, and was one of those who agreed to name names in evidence to the House of Representatives unAmerican Activities Committee in 1953. From the 1960s, his work acquired an unmistakably conservative tone, influenced by strong American patriotism. Following the work of Frederick Jackson Turner on the influence of the frontier on American democracy, he argued that the American character had been shaped by the experience of taming and settling a continent.

His conservatism stood on the grand American tradition of the grouch and the curmudgeon; he had more in common with Albert Jay Nock and HL Mencken than with President William McKinley or the opponents of the New Deal. He also loved to twist the tails of shallow and fashionable progressives.

Even those who were made uncomfortable by his conservative and nationalistic conclusions found much in Boorstin's work to admire. He said that as an "amateur historian" - he trained as a lawyer - he looked at subjects that were outside the canon of conventional history, such as the effect of wrist watches, mail-order catalogues and air conditioning on history.

He was also a master of epigram and aphorism. "We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant," he wrote, and he defined a celebrity as "a person who is known for his well-knownness".

Boorstin was born in Atlanta, Georgia. His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants, and his father, a lawyer, was part of the defence team in the notorious lynching case of Leo Frank, a Jewish manager falsely accused - and convicted - of raping and murdering a gentile girl. After Frank's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, he was lynched by a Ku Klux-Klan-style mob. Boorstin's parents were driven to move to Oklahoma, where Daniel went to school.

He then studied at Harvard University, graduating with the highest honours, and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, where he took a double first and qualified as a barrister. On his return to America, he earned a doctorate in law from Yale Law School and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar.

Before going to Chicago University, he taught at Swarthmore, Radcliffe and Harvard. In 1969, he moved to Washington to become director of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. One of his first moves on being appointed librarian of Congress in 1975 was to insist that the heavy bronze doors of the building should be left open. "They said it would create a draught," he later recalled, "and I said, 'Good. That's just what we need.'"

Boorstin wrote about many inventions and new technologies. He maintained that mankind's single, greatest technical advance was the book.

In 1941, he married Ruth Frankel, with whom he had three children, and who became his editor. "Without her," he was quoted as saying, "I think my works would have been twice as long and half as readable."

· Daniel J Boorstin, social historian, born October 1 1914; died February 28 2004